The Shah's Health and The Douglas Memoirs

A Panamanian doctor of the shah of Iran's medical team said yesterday that the exiled ruler could not have survived surgery scheduled for last weekend and "doesn't have long to live."

The surgeon, called in as a consultant at Paitilla Hospital in Panama City, told a source in the United States yesterday that the exiled ruler's lymphoma has worsened since he left New York.

The shah's defenses are reportedly so low, according to the doctor, that surgery is going to be "very risky."

The operation to remove the shah's inflamed spleen has been tentatively re-scheduled for Holy Week at the beginning of April, the doctor said.

But the surgery will be delayed again if the shah's condition does not improve during the next two weeks. The Panamanian doctor said the shah is in a weakened state after a bout with the flu which he contracted on the resort island of Contadora.

The official hospital statement said:

"The physicians who have been called to see the Shah together with the Panamanian physicians who are charged with his care have carefully reviewed and analyzed all studies that have been performed, and, on the basis of these analyses, it was their unanimous opinion to defer surgery with the view of preparing him for the operation at a later date when his condition is optimal."

Special prosecutor Arthur H. Christy wants White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan and his accusers to take lie-detector tests to determine who is telling the truth about the alleged cocaine-sniffing incident at Studio 54 in New York City.

One of the main witnesses against Jordan, publicist Barry landau, said last week that he has been advised by his attorney "to go ahead."

Landau says his lawyer is arranging a privately-administered polygraph test first "so that I won't be nervous and I'll know how it works."

Landau will take the special prosecutor's test before giving testimony to a grand jury sometime later this month.

The Library of Congress is getting a lot of calls from journalists and historians who thought they saw a way to find out what's going to be in the late Associate Justice William O. Douglas's memoirs before they are published.

Douglas had been depositing his papers regularly in the Library's manuscript division, which has custody of his files through 1977. But only those papers dealing with events through the 1950s have actually been turned over to the government and made public.

Paul Heffron, chief of the manuscript division, said yesterday that papers from the last decades of Douglas's life -- those that are expected to contain the most critical observations on the Supreme Court and his fellow justices -- will not become government property until his will has been probated.

That will take months, Heffron said, and then researchers will need several months more to catalogue the papers. When they are made available to the public, it will be "everybody at the same time," Heffron said.

By that time, Douglas's book, which is expected to be as much of a bombshell as the best-selling "The Brethren," should be in the bookstores.